In Stanley Cup Finals, Big Markets Don’t Mean Big Viewership

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An intense final pits New York against Los Angeles for the first time in hockey as the Rangers and Kings face off in the championship. Three story lines to follow.Published OnJune 4, 2014CreditImage by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

The Stanley Cup finals between the Rangers and Los Angeles Kings are the ninth being carried by NBC and its cable companion, NBCSN (and its Versus and OLN antecedents), a long period of media stability for the N.H.L. Under NBC, the finals have averaged as many as 5.7 million viewers (last year’s Original Six battle between Boston and Chicago) and as few as 1.8 million (the 2007 Ottawa-Anaheim series). Now, as teams from the nation’s two largest markets meet, some wonder if this is the formula for record viewership.

It is not. Or more correctly, we do not know for certain. The hypothesis has not been tested often enough with the right teams in the markets.

“A great rating is about how long the series goes,” said Sam Flood, the executive producer of NBC Sports. “We’re rooting for the opposite team to win each game.”

Translation: The network makes more money the longer a series goes, and, by the way, it’s more exciting if it’s not a sweep.

The two markets met in championship series three times recently: in 2002, 2003 and 2012, once in the N.B.A. finals and twice in the Stanley Cup finals.

But none of the series were the best tests of the two-market formula because the Nets, the Devils and Anaheim were part of them, but not the Knicks or the Rangers.

In 2002, the Los Angeles Lakers swept the then-New Jersey Nets in a series that drew an average of 15.7 million viewers, more than three million fewer than the previous season when the Lakers beat Philadelphia. In 2003, the Nets and San Antonio, two teams without great national followings, combined to generate only 9.9 million viewers.

In the 2003 Stanley Cup finals, the Devils and the Ducks, who had yet to drop the Mighty from their name, attracted 3.6 million viewers, the best for the league until 2008 and 2009 when successive Detroit-Pittsburgh series drew about 4.5 million viewers each. But when the Kings played the Devils in the 2012 finals, only three million were interested.

If the Blackhawks had not lost to the Kings in the Western Conference finals, a Chicago-New York series might have produced record viewership. Fans love Original Six series.

The Blackhawks and the Bruins led the league in the number of cable households watching their local games. According to Nielsen, Chicago averaged 152,000, and the Bruins had 120,000.

The Rangers, on MSG Network, ranked third, with 96,000. But the Kings were far lower, with 23,000, and the Ducks were well below them, with 13,000.

During the second and third rounds of the playoffs on NBC’s networks, the Chicago market averaged 513,000 households, Boston 424,000, the Rangers 362,000 and the Kings 157,000.

And if you look at the number of households that were tuned to the opening game of the last two Stanley Cup finals, you can understand that Chicago would have attracted more viewers than the Kings in the finals. In 2012, the 874,000 households in the Chicago market watched Game 1; in 2013, 231,000 watched in Los Angeles.

“It’s going to be different than if the Hawks were in,” Flood said during a conference call on Tuesday.

Eddie Olczyk, NBC’s analyst for the finals who is also the Blackhawks’ analyst on cable, said the team had blended the success of winning two Stanley Cups in the past four seasons with innovative marketing that was aided drastically a few years ago when the owner Rocky Wirtz reversed his father’s longtime refusal to show home games on TV.

“You could argue that the Blackhawks sit atop the sports totem pole in Chicago,” he said by telephone Tuesday. “No team has had more recent success.”

Alas, it will be the Rangers and the Kings, 20 years since the Rangers beat Vancouver to win the Cup. Back then, the series was broadcast nationally on ESPN but the network was blacked out in New York, where the games were shown on MSG. The series averaged 2.4 million viewers on ESPN, which would have been more if Canadian markets like Vancouver, British Columbia, were included in Nielsen’s United States calculations. A year earlier, when the Montreal Canadiens defeated the Kings in five games to win the Cup, the viewership averaged a less-impressive 1.8 million.

One ingredient that is missing from N.H.L. viewership is a collection of crossover stars who can bring in a lot of casual fans to the postseason.

“We have a lot of players who are must-see appointment television,” Olczyk said, but probably too few leap over the boards and into the living rooms of those who are not die-hard hockey fans.

The Celebrity DBI, an index that assesses the appeal of athletes and entertainers in a broad array of characteristics, gives longtime stars Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin middling scores of 40.66 and 39.77, and Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, the star of an Advil commercial campaign, a 37.81.

The top DBI among N.H.L. players was charted by Wayne Gretzky, who last played 15 years ago. His 74.77 score was boosted by an awareness level that comes from redefining his sport.

If Lundqvist shuts out the Kings in four straight — having conquered a computer-generated rhinoceros made of pucks for Advil — he would not surpass Gretzky.

Email: sandor@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Don’t Expect Coast-to-Coast Fervor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe